


The Hand that Feeds You

by Aesoleucian



Series: Incident Reports from the Usher Foundation [6]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Statement, Usher Foundation, not tagging an entity bc it's a bit ambiguous
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-24
Updated: 2019-02-24
Packaged: 2019-11-05 05:02:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17912501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aesoleucian/pseuds/Aesoleucian
Summary: Statement of Victoria Tran regarding a cat owned by her friend Tia Whitehead, given October 3, 2001.





	The Hand that Feeds You

Branch location: Usher Foundation Los Angeles, 628 New High St.

Instance reported by: Victoria Tran  
Reporter initial and date: _VT 10/3/01_

Witness: Liam Caudell                                                      ID#: 00677  
Witnes initial and date: _LC 10/3/01_

Incident summary: My friend Tia’s cat is weird.  
Description of incident: _(attached)_

 

[Transcript begins]

VT: Have you ever heard those stories about old ladies who have too many cats, and when they die the cats eat them? I think it’s supposed to say something about how cats see us as nothing more than slabs of meat that feed them, and, well, when we stop giving them canned food they see no difference. I guess that’s half right. I’ve always liked cats, honestly. I never felt like they only cared when I fed them. I never had one because I’m trying to save up money for emergencies, or maybe some day… never mind. The point is I don’t have a cat but lots of my friends do. Including Tia. Tia was basically my best friend in high school, and then we kind of drifted apart because she went to college down here and I stayed working in the small town where we grew up. I mean, kind of small. But last year I moved into LA and it was actually practical to go visit her. I never went that many times, we both have—had busy work schedules. But a couple times, yeah.

I texted her about three weeks ago, and she doesn’t respond _that_ promptly, so I wasn’t super worried when I didn’t get an answer for a week. Second week I was kind of worried, so I called her. She didn’t pick up. I decided to go visit and see if she was okay. She’s had kind of a history with depression? In high school sometimes she’d miss class and her mom would call me to come talk to her. Not about anything in particular. She just liked to talk about nothing to take her mind off it. So I went over on my day off.

I knocked on the door of her apartment but she didn’t answer. I did call ahead, but she didn’t pick up then either, so I figured it must be really bad and I got the key she hid under the door sill thing that was loose. And I went inside.

I don’t… really know what happened. I think she died. This sounds horrible but I _hope_ she died. Because if she was still in there…

Um, sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. I was walking in calling for her. It smelled a little bad, but nothing major, I think she hadn’t been taking out the garbage. It didn’t smell like a dead body! I was kind of relieved about that, not that I really know what a body smells like. And then her cat comes trotting up out of another room. She just barely got him the last time I visited about a month before that. He’s this big fluffy gray cat named Sarge, and he seemed like he was so happy to see me. Rubbed up against my legs and everything. I asked him where Tia was, and he ran back into the other room. I… I thought it would be cute if he knew I was asking for her. I followed him.

At first I actually thought she was sitting on the beanbag chair in her room, because I could see her sweater. But I couldn’t see her head, so I thought she was kind of slumped in some way I couldn’t quite understand. But I could see her arm thrown out to the side, with the sweater only coming halfway down her forearm, although she was so still I was scared for a moment that she’d died. But Sarge headbutted her hand and it came up to pet him. And I thought, that’s good, she’s not so far gone she can’t pet her cat. “Hey, Tia,” I said. “How are you doing?”

She didn’t seem to have heard me, so I guess at the time I thought she was too depressed to acknowledge that I was there? So I came closer and crouched down by her as Sarge settled down into her lap. It’s difficult to process, you know? When something has the right texture and the right—it even _smelled_ like her, I could smell her shampoo even though I couldn’t see her hair anywhere—your brain just won’t believe what you’re seeing.

I kneeled there for a while trying to understand what was going on, because it was so much like Tia in all the right ways, except I couldn’t—couldn’t figure out where her _head_ was. Then Sarge’s ears pricked up and he got out of her lap and he did the… you know, hunting crouch. He wiggled his butt in that cute way cats do, and then he pounced on something in the corner. When he came back I could see he was holding a mouse. I groaned and told him not now, or something, and reached out to try to shake her shoulder. But there wasn’t a shoulder there. It was just this smooth… flesh, under her sweater. Her arm, her one arm that she had left, wasn’t attached at a shoulder. It kind of came out the middle of what used to be her torso. And she had a lap, but she didn’t have _legs_. Just this kind of perfectly Sarge-sized depression he had been curled into.

She raised her arm toward me, her fingers outstretched like she was searching—because, you know, she couldn’t see me. She found my arm and started… petting me. That was _weird_ , but I still didn’t really get it until I heard this kind of wet crunching noise, and I looked down, and… at the end of this tube of skin, like a throat stretched too long across the floor, there was her mouth. Lying open and chewing the mouse Sarge had put there.

That was when I almost threw up. I swallowed bile and shot up to my feet, shaking off Tia’s—well, _something’s_ —hand, and I ran.

I called the police obviously, when I got out of there and had some time to freak out and hyperventilate. I don’t know what they did with it. I don’t want to know, and I have no idea what I’m going to tell her family. I just… is that how they see us? Humans would be so—so much more convenient if they couldn’t go outside and leave. You just have to feed them occasionally and they’ll be a warm lap whenever you want it. Sorry, I’m done. I can’t…

[Transcript ends]

 

Follow-up:  
_I contacted what LAPD colloquially calls their Weird Operations unit and managed to get their writeup of the incident, which is attached. In summary the thing that may have once been Tia Whitehead didn’t offer any kind of resistance or even notice the presence of the police until it was touched, but when they lifted it to take it away the cat put up a surprising amount of resistance. No mention was made of how they disposed of the body. However, the report does note that in the two weeks since then, one of the officers who it scratched has gone missing, and if you want I can send you my report when I look into that. I’m curious how it sees them._

_F.V. 10-17-2001_

**Author's Note:**

> (chanting) animal avatars! animal avatars!


End file.
